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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 September 2010
In 1935, as the Nazis’ state-of-the art eugenics exhibition from the Deutsches Hygiene Museum was concluding its American tour, a decision had to be made about whether to return the displays to Germany or to house them in an American museum. After the American Academy of Medicine decided against the display because of its political implications, the director of the Buffalo Museum of Science, Carlos Cummings, himself a physician, offered his institution as the exhibition's permanent home. “What is the astounding eugenics program upon which Chancellor Hitler has launched the German people?” Cummings wondered aloud. “As a matter of public interest, without endorsement,” he added, “the Museum will display in the Central Hall throughout this final quarter of 1935, a set of fifty-one posters and charts . . . which gives Americans a graphic explanation of Germany's campaign to rear in posterity ‘a new race nobility.’” Seven years later, with war raging, the museum received permission from the company that had insured the exhibition, to dismantle it from its permanent home in the museum's Hall of Heredity. An exhibition about eugenics, Nazi eugenics no less, that had been enthusiastically received as it had traveled the United States in the mid-1930s, had seemingly fallen victim to the war against eugenics launched by cultural anthropologists and geneticists. In light of the broad scholarship on eugenics, this certainly would be a plausible reading of the deinstallation of the Nazi eugenics exhibition. But the three books under review here suggest a more complex reading, one that suggests that eugenics and racism, considered as ideological systems, were less easily dislodged from American culture than from Buffalo's Museum of Science.
1 Rydell, Robert, Cogdell, Christina, and Largent, Mark, “The Nazi Eugenics Exhibit in the United States, 1934–43,” in Currell, Susan and Cogdell, Christina, eds., Popular Eugenics: National Efficiency and American Mass Culture in the 1930s (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006), 359–84Google Scholar.
2 Haller, Mark H., Eugenics: Hereditarian Attitudes in American Thought (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1963)Google Scholar; Rosenberg, Charles S., No Other Gods: On Science and American Social Thought (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997Google Scholar; first published 1976); Kevles, Daniel J., In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985)Google Scholar; Adams, Mark, The Wellborn Science: Eugenics in Germany, France, Brazil and Russia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; Barkan, Elazar, The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States between the World Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992)Google Scholar; Kuhl, Stefan, The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Pernick, Martin S., The Black Stork: Eugenics and the Death of the “Defective” Babies in American Medicine and Motion Pictures since 1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996)Google Scholar; Zenderland, Leila, Measuring Minds: Henry Herbert Goddard and the Origins of American Intelligence Testing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Black, Edwin, War against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003)Google Scholar.
3 Galton, Francis, Inquiries into Human Faculties (New York: MacMillan, 1883), 24–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 Recent works that make this point include Kline, Wendy, Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001)Google Scholar; Black, War against the Weak; Cogdell, Christina, Eugenics by Design: Streamlining America in the 1930s (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004)Google Scholar; English, Daylanne K., Unnatural Selections: Eugenics in American Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004)Google Scholar; Rosen, Christine, Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Currell and Cogdell, Popular Eugenics; Lombardo, Paul A., Three Generations, No Imbecile: Eugenics, The Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008)Google Scholar; Largent, Mark, Breeding Contempt: The History of Coerced Sterilization in the United States (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008)Google Scholar; Deutsch, Nathaniel, Inventing America's “Worst” Family: Eugenics, Islam, and the Rise of the Tribe of Ishmael (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009)Google Scholar.
5 Rainger, Ronald, An Agenda for Antiquity: Henry Fairfield Osborn and Vertebrate Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History (Birmingham: University of Alabama Press, 1991)Google Scholar.
6 Kline, Building a Better Race, 7–14; Brechin, Gray, “Conserving the Race: Natural Aristocracies, Eugenics, and the U.S. Conservation Movement,” Antipodes 28 (1996), 229–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 “Raymond Loewy, Designer of Locomotives and Lipsticks, Creates a Future Travel Dress,” Vogue 93 (1 Feb. 1939), 141.
8 English quoted in Wolff, 208.
9 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995)Google Scholar.
